1 \ AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN VERSE IF thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven, Then, to the measure of that Heaven-born light, Shine, Poet ! in thy place, and be content : The stars pre-eminent in magnitude, And they that from the zenith dart their beams, (Visible though they be to half the earth, Though half a sphere be conscious of their bright ness), Are yet of no diviner origin, No purer essence, than the one that burns, lake an untended watch-fire, on the ridge Of some dark mountain ; or than those which seem Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps, Among the branches of the leafless trees. Wordsworth AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN VERSE Chosen ty A. METHUEN With an Introduction by ROBERT LYND "By nothing is England so glorious as by her poetry "MATTHEW ARNOLD METHUEN & GO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.G. LONDON Twenty-First Edition tttff iva, isth Published . \ . ,. r May 1921 Second Edition . ; June 1921 Third Edition . July 1921 Fourth Edition (enlarged) September 1921 Fifth (Thin Paper) Edition . October 2oth 1921 Sixth (Thin Paper) Edition . December 1921 Seventh Edition . December 1921 Eighth Edition . April 1922 Ninth Edition September 1922 Tenth (Thin Paper) Edition . December 1922 Eleventh Edition . January 1923 Twelfth Edition . May 1923 Thirteenth Edition October 1923 Fourteenth (Thin Paper) Edition November 1923 Fifteenth Edition . February 1924 Sixteenth Edition . July 1924 Seventeenth (Thin Paper) Edition October 1924 Eighteenth Edition November 1924 Nineteenth (Thin Paper) Edition November 1925 Twentieth Edition November 1925 Twenty-first Edition . 1926 School Edition . June 1921 Second School Edition . A ugust 1922 Third School Edition . November 1922 Fourth School Edition . Jum 1923 Fifth School Edition . July 1923 Sixth School Edition . November 1923 Seventh School Edition . March 1924 Eighth School Edition . September 1924 Ninth School Edition . December 1924 Tenth School Edition . June 1925 Eleventh School Edition November 1925 Twelfth School Edition . January 1926 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN TO THOMAS HARDY, O.M. GREATEST OF THE MODERNS CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT LYND . ix COMPILER'S NOTE . , xxxv INDEX ov AUTHORS .... xxxvii TEXT . ..,.. 1-248 INDEX OF FIRST LINES 249 Til ON POETRY & THE MODERN MAN T)OETRY was born, like Beatrice, under a dancing * star. There is in the nature of things a law of dancing which, at a crisis of great happiness or exaltation, sets the thoughts and the emotions leaping rhythmically to time* All men, even those who would be most surprised to be reckoned among the poets or the followers of the poets, are subject to this law. Every child is a poet from the age at which he learns to beat a silver spoon on the table in numbers. He likes to make not only a noise but a noise with something of the regularity of an echo. He coos with delight when he is taken on an elder's knee and is trotted up and down to the " measure of This is the way the ladies ride," with its steady advance of pace till the ultimate fury of the country clown's gallop. Later on, he himself trots gloriously in reins with bells that jingle in rhyme as he runs / His pleasure in swings, in sitting behind a horse, in travelling in a train, with its puff as regular as an uncle's watch and its wheel* ix x ON POETRY thudding out endless hexameters on the line, arise from the same delight in rhythm. We may even trace the origins of the poet in those first reduplica tions of sound that lead a child to call a train a puff-puff and its mother ma-ma. Cynics may pretend that it is nurses and foolish parents who invent the language of babyhood. It is the child, however, who feels that a sound does not mean enough till it has rhymed itself double, and who " " of its own accord will gravely murmur cawr-cawr " " to a scratching hen or wow-wow to a dog with expectant eyes and ears. It is difficult to remember what was the first literature one enjoyed in childhood. But I feel reasonably certain that it was in rhyme. No child who ever lived in an old house, with a clock like a tall wooden tower beating the seconds at the turn of the stairs, but must have owed one of its first literary thrills to Hickory-dickory-dock. To know the rhyme was to live with a clock that might become a mouse's race-course. It made the stairs even more intensely exciting than they were before. It brought the patter of new hopes and fears into the house. The nursery-rhyme thrill, I think, precedes by a considerable time the prose thrill of Jack the, Giant-Kitter, and even in Jack the Giant-Killer it is when the Giant falls to rhyming with his Fee-foh-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, that the excitement catches fire. It is in verse that the imagination learns its first steps. The first sorrows with which we learn to sympathize in litera ture are the sorrows of Bo-peep. Our first sense AND THE MODERN MAN xi of the comedy of disaster we owe to Jack and Jill. Into ethical comedy the comedy brought to adult perfection by Moliere we were initiated at the hands of Little Jack Homer and Margery Daw. Reading and hearing the nursery-rhymes, indeed, we went round the entire clock-face of the emotions at least of the emotions possible to a child. We were merry with Old King Cole, excited with Little Miss Muffet, distraught with the Old Woman who lived in a Shoe. We heard the bell toll for Cock Robin and stood by his grave. Cross- patch was as real to us as the face in the mirror. We opened the door into romance with a rhyme about a white horse and a woman who had rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. Critics of literature are fond of making a distinction between poetry and verse, and it is possible to make these distinctions in regard to nursery rhymes equally with every other kind of literature. If we must do so, I should say that, while Little Miss Muffet is indubitably verse and Little Jack Horner (though rich in character as in diet) almost indubitably so, Ride-a-Cock-Horse is poetry. Here we are in a fantastic world, a world beyond the prose of know ledge. Polly, Put the Kettle On, contains not a word or a rhyme that makes the world a new place for us. Ride a Cock-Horse, however, and Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, carry us out of our walled lives like a dream. They liberate us into a fairy land of chiming music and flowers. In poetry we are continually being re-born into new fairylands. The poet in the child is a traveller into fairyland, and if at a later stage he returns to reality, he must bring back with him fire from xii ON POETRY cannot that Heaven if he is to remain a poet. He unless he has first been a be a poet of experience as a random poet of innocence. Poetry begins of it voyage among the blue seas fancy, though may end with the return of a laden treasure-ship of home. of the imagination into the harbours dissociate The poet of riper years cannot entirely his imaginative life from his every-day experience. life under whatever He is always a commentator on the other claims disguises. The child, on hand, can build complete liberty of the imagination, and for itself at a moment's notice a world as perfect and useless and beautiful as a soap-bubble a world in which defiance is bidden to all the zoologists that are. and geographers and gods of the things the The child, it may be argued, is in this enjoying pleasure of inexperience rather than rebelling us clue against experience, and, perhaps, this gives a to one of the secrets of poetry. The poet must always retain a mighty sense of inexperience of a world outside him of which he can know nothing save by guesses and wonder. True poetry begins with the delighted use of this sense. It creates the mermaid, the unicorn and the fiery dragon. It peoples the vague unknown with witches on broom sticks and fairies and beasts that are kings' sons in disguise. Distance has no terrors for it, and we can travel over impossible spaces either in seven-league boots or by the light of a candle : " " How many miles to Babylon ? "Three score and ten." ** " Can I get there by candle-light ? "Yes, and back again." That is the poet's licence. Impossible trees bear AND THE MODERN MAN xiii impossible fruits, and for their sake an impossible princess conies over the sea : I had a little nut tree ; Nothing would it bear, But a silver nutmeg And a golden pear. The King of Spain's daughter Came to visit me And all because Of my little nut tree. You might easily construct a theory of poetry, taking this most charming of nursery-songs as your text. Here, better than in many a more pompous poem, you can see what it is that distinguishes poetry from prose. Here is the imagination escaping from the four walls laughing at the four walls and building its own house out of nothing but beauty and rhymes. Like all fine poetry, it is a thing of pleasant sights and pleasant sounds of images and music. Prose, too, can give us these delights.